THREE CHANGE STRATEGIES IN ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT: DATA-BASED, HIGH ENGAGEMENT, AND GENERATIVE BY GERVASE R. BUSHE & SARAH LEWIS

Please find below an article co-authored by Gervase Bushe and myself recently accepted for publication in the Leadership and Organization Development Journal, Jan 2023 - Sarah Lewis

Bushe, G.R. and Lewis, S. (2023), "Three change strategies in organization development: data-based, high engagement and generative", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-05-2022-0229

Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited. This AAM is provided for your own personal use only. It may not be used for resale, reprinting, systematic distribution, emailing, or for any other commercial purpose without the permission of the publisher.

Highlights from ABP conference

At the ABP conference on the 10th and 11th of November, I was struck by the professionalism of the presenters and the high standard of their content. I wanted to share a few of the ‘nuggets’ I picked up with you.

The ‘know it all’ and ‘learn it all’ culture difference

Matthew Syed introduced these two terms, the first reflecting a fixed mindset. The ‘know it all’ mindset can have some adverse effects:

• Everyone wants to look like the smartest person in the room, it’s all about showing off what you know, not being interested in what others might know.

• The competitive attitude undermines psychological safety.

• The need to be right can lead to ‘blame the customers’ mindset.

• And, as very often ‘people like us’ sound more intelligent, this attitude can lead to a monoculture in the organization.

Not great then!

The ‘learn it all ‘culture, more like a growth mindset, is much more interested in a diversity of knowledge and resources in the room, including the tactic knowledge that is part and parcel of different life experiences. It is this that enhances the ‘granular capacity’ of a group or organization to understand the diverse world of their customers and other stakeholders. In essence, we need a growth mindset and diversity to solve complex interdisciplinary problems. I thought these two terms very useful to summarise the difference.

Some fascinating takeaways

The 2-for-the-price-of-1 employee

Andrew Whyatt- Sames, introduced this concept of an employee which I hadn’t come across before. With a 2-4-1 employee, the employer gets the unpaid services of the partner at home doing all the domestic work enabling the employee to work ‘as if’ he or she had no other responsibilities. An arrangement which, not only takes us back to the 1950s, but, of course, also disadvantages all those employees who have to carry their own load at home.

‘Be nice to them or they’ll leave’

Summed up the message to bosses trying to revert to the good old pre-covid days of 7/5 office attendance. That ship has sailed.

Poor mental health on average costs employers £1652 per employee per annum

So asserted Maria Gardener while also sharing that Deloittes found a 5:1 return on investment in well being in their 2020 research. However, it depends how you spend the money. One size does not fit all, and an over reliance on sticky plasters and panic stations has little long-term benefit. Wellbeing needs to extend to financial wellbeing. You can offer your employees resilience workshops and mindfulness apps until they are coming out of their ears, but if you don’t pay them enough to make ends meet, then all a bit beside the point.

Ghost Meetings

These are non-existent meetings that desperate people book just for just to give themselves space to recharge in overpacked office days.

How to hack happiness

Amanda Potter from Betalent’s took us on a deep dive into the neurophysiology of both happiness and stress, with great suggestions for how to ‘hack’ happiness. I was delighted to see I was already using so many

• Snacking on nuts and seeds supports acetylcholine production, a rebalancing chemical

• Celebrating little wins produces dopamine. Yeah, I did it, I changed the filters on the hoover!

• Chocolate. Okay, so my go to is a Lint Easter Bunny rather than worthy dark chocolate but I’m sure its just as good for the serotonin

• And I’ve recently discovered Epsom salts in a hot bath – it was on the list,  honest!

The decisive amongst us are 12 times more likely to be high performing than those plagued by procastrination.

Psychological safety

Amanda and her team undertook some research identifying the characteristics of psychologically safe teams or spaces, which include such things such as

• Feeling personally connected,

• Feeling included,

• Appreciating and being appreciated.

While in psychologically unsafe teams or spaces people want to please, feel they have to be nice all the time, defer to leadership, are consensus driven, and seek consistency. All of which leads us back round to our opening idea of the ‘know it all culture’ with its premium on people who think like us and a lack of dissent.

 My thanks to everyone. It was a great event, really one of the better conferences out there.

Other Resources

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Co-Creating Planning Teams For Dialogic OD’, ‘Positive Psychology in Business’ ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology and Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management'.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organisations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

If you want to know more about implementing approaches and processes that positively affect people’s happiness, engagement, motivation, morale, productivity and work relationships, see Sarah’s positive psychology books.

More blog posts categorised as ‘Thought Provoking’ 

A Client’s write up of an Appreciative Inquiry Event

This account of a recent one-day Appreciative Inquiry Event by Alan Brunstrom of ECSAT. He wrote it for their internal use and copied me in. I thought it gave a very good sense of the client experience and asked if I might share it on my website.

I hope you find it useful in creating a sense of how these events come about, how they are experienced, and what they can produce.

ECSAT Futures Day

On 13thFebruary ECSAT hosted a unique event, inviting everyone who works at the Centre to contribute their ideas and vision for our individual and collective futures. More than two thirds of those based here joined in, producing a wealth of proposals that also revealed a remarkable amount of shared thinking.

The day was based on the “Appreciative Enquiry” approach, which has already been used successfully by the NAV Directorate. This focuses people’s minds on positives (“What works well here?”, “What would I like to see and do more of?”) rather than on negatives. Moderated by external consultant Sarah Lewis, the method is bottom-up not top-down, with the Head of Centre introducing the event but management otherwise present as participants not leaders. It also cuts across ESA’s normal Directorate boundaries, including both staff and contractors from every team in ECSAT.

Most people were pleasantly surprised by how much fun it was, enjoying the opportunity to network and share ideas outside of their usual teams. The morning sessions were especially enjoyed (it’s always nice to dream without constraints) but the most significant results emerged from the more challenging afternoon sessions, when different ideas competed for attention and support. 

It was striking that a few themes emerged consistently from many different teams, even down to how people in separate rooms represented them graphically. Strongest among these were the concept of ECSAT as an Innovation Centre; and the desire for a Visitor Centre that would become a destination in its own right (above and beyond the current plans for the ECSAT Phase 2 conference centre).

Nine individual topics - some but not all related to these big themes - attracted champions and supporters who are willing to drive them forward. Here they are, along with their conveners (who you can approach if you’d like to know more (The names have been removed for website publication, as requested by Alan):

·      Visitor Centre for exhibitions and education 

·      Makerspace at ECSAT 

·      Autonomous vehicles connecting the Harwell Campus 

·      ESA Skunk Works (project management for New Space)

·      Contractors’ Community 

·      Oxford Airport Flights 

·      Kids’ Day@ECSAT 

·      Virtual Campus 

·      Open Lectures 

These topic groups are now busily developing their plans. These are self-driven and not a wish list for management action, although most of them will bring forward specific actions, requests and justifications to the appropriate managers as and when decisions and resources are needed. To make that process more efficient,(another removed name)is coordinating between them to identify any commonalities.

More details, including lots of photos from the day, are available on the dedicated esaconnect forum. If you have any inputs or questions, or would like to propose additional topics, feel free to contact the topic leaders or simply post them on the forum.

We aim to convene a short follow-up meeting in early June, so that everyone can hear how the various groups are getting along – details to follow.

Thanks to all those who took part for their active and positive contribution!

Where Next With Positive Psychology

Earlier this month I attended the Global Strengthscope Practitioner Conference in London. A wonderful and inspiring conference where completely unexpectedly I was presented with the 2017 conference ‘Outstanding Contribution to Positive Work Practices Award.’ I was delighted and honoured and it got me thinking about what we have achieved so far in bringing positive work practices into the workplace and what we have yet to achieve.

There are some specific practices that stem from positive psychology that have and are definitely making their way into the workplace. Strengths awareness is one. Thanks to the work of Strengths Partnership and others the language of strengths, and, the ability to identify and measure strengths is an established work practice in many organizations. The need to help people work to their strengths is making headway in organizations. Only the other day I received an inquiry from someone in a large manufacturing automobile organization for a strengths framework to replace their competency framework. They wanted a ready to go, large scale complete strengths based process to support development from recruitment onwards. I was able to introduce them to BeTalent who have developed a fantastic, online strengths and related behaviour assessment and development process, suitable for use at scale, that is exactly what the inquirer was looking for. This ‘work practice’ is on the edge of mainstream practice.

The importance of mood or positivity to work culture and performance is making headway although still regarded by many as something to concentrate on after doing the difficult thing not as a way of doing the difficult thing. Positivity is central to Appreciative Inquiry, a methodology for change that can usefully be regarded as an operationalization of positive psychology for the workplace, which itself is definitely more widely known and practiced in the UK than it was when I started practicing in this way in the late 1990s. It is taught as an approach in our management colleges and these days people are more likely to approach me specifically asking for an Appreciative Inquiry intervention.

Wellbeing has long been a workplace concern, and the emphasis of positive psychology on flourishing and positive health has had an impact on workplace practices in this area. Nic Marks, previously of the National Economics Foundation and presently CEO of Happiness Works has been a pioneer in developing organisational ‘happiness’ or wellbeing measurement tools built from positive psychology principles. The development of organization-wide measurement processes allows positive work practices to be implemented at scale.

For myself, as a sole practitioner, my contribution has been more on a ‘bits and pieces’ basis. I bring the positive psychology perspective to bear on every assignment one way or another, and increasingly find myself an educator both in business and academia on positive psychology and its implementation in the workplace. I am able to run Appreciative Inquiry informed events, or run sessions on strengths, or help develop positive and appreciative leadership skills. And of course I have tried to spread the work through my writing. And I am not alone, there is a growing band of UK based positive psychology practitioners, thanks not least to the Positive Psychology Masters established at the University of East London by Dr Ilona Boniwell.

For the future my ambition and vision is for this to become a movement.

To this end I am already talking to people about establishing something akin to an Institute for Flourishing Organizations. I see such an organisation acting as a central hub for those attempting to create flourishing organizations in the UK, those seeking to work in such organizations and those with skills to help. In my mind it will be a home for those interested in this growing movement so they can find other like-minded people. I want it to act to bring the positive psychology and the Appreciative Inquiry field together around their shared ambition of creating flourishing at work.

My vision at present for such an organisation is that it would promote positive psychology practice in organizations; offer measurement and assessment processes, possibly a badge of accreditation; act as guidance for job seekers looking for organizations that ‘got this’; offer a resource for academics seeking research possibilities; bring together positive psychology and Appreciative Inquiry. This organisation would be where my friend who asked if I knew of organizations that worked in a strengths-based way so he could apply to them, and my colleague seeking a strengths-based alternative to competencies, could come to find answers.

I firmly believe we have enough knowledge and well developed practice now that we can offer a full organisational service that has something to offer or say to every aspect of organisational life from recruitment to strategy to downsizing. We know we can help organizations adopt more flourishing work practices on a piece by piece transactional basis, and I believe we know enough now to be able to develop a truly transformational way of organisational life fit for the challenges of twenty-first century life.

I can’t think of a more fitting way to build on the honour of the award and to create a lasting legacy of my nearly thirty years of contributing to positive workplace practices.

I’d love to hear any initial thoughts in response to this piece, and if you want to be involved in the conversation as it develops please let me know.

Book Review – Holocracy The Revolutionary Management System that Abolishes Hierarchy: Brian Robertson (Originally published in AI Practitioner)

Why this book?

This book claims to offer an alternative way of organizing that breaks away from the command and control model or as Brain calls it ‘the predict and control’ model. This seemed sufficiently in line with our aspirations to warrant further investigation.

Brief account of the book

The book has noble, honourable and inspiring intentions: it offers holocracy as a ‘new operating system’ for organizations that will create a ‘peer-to-peer distributed authority system’. This operating system creates empowered people who are clear about the boundaries of their authority, about what they can expect from others, and are able to be highly effective in their roles.

In this model the organizing process itself becomes the ultimate power, more than any individual, and every individual can have a voice in designing and altering the process. It is a flat system of roles and links that delivers high autonomy. It is predicated on a system of roles (essentially disembodied job descriptions), decision-making circles (meetings by another name) and a process of links. It bravely attempts both to relieve leaders of the pressure of the demand of omnipotence, and to make it possible for weak signals of dysfunction, lack of alignment, gaps in accountability, missed opportunities etc. to be attended to promptly and effectively by empowered individuals. It offers a clear process for distinguishing working in the business from working on the business. It presents a view of strategy as ‘dynamic steering’ by simple rules or principles towards a general purpose. In this way it attempts to simulate evolutionary development processes and indeed sees itself as an evolutionary model.

Holocracy - Too much to ask?

Reading this book was an interesting experience. The book is a ‘how to’ book and it sets out the process model in great detail, describing the purpose of key facilitator roles and the process of key tactical and governance meetings (circles in the terminology of the model). It’s not hard to tell that the author and originator of this model has a software development background. My initial impression reading it was reminiscent of getting to grips with the complex board games of Allies and Axis that my sons and husband loved to play some years ago: a complex set of rules about the properties and powers of various pieces and cards subject to the rules of the dice. In the early stages as much time was spent consulting the rule-book as playing the game. As I read on I realised there was a strong binary flavour underpinning much of the process, an ‘if this then that’ logic driven by an implicit flow chart of binary decision-making. The author’s argument is that these tight constraints work to create an empowered freedom within them. However it is noticeable that much of the instruction reads ‘no discussion allowed’ as the process is strictly followed. In essence he is trying to programme out the negative aspects of the human element in this organizing process and to create an organisational process that functions effectively despite the emotional and relational wayward behaviour of people. This takes a lot of discipline on the part of all the players; which is to say it takes organizational energy.

The author is honest enough to point out that this new process doesn’t always ‘take’ in organizations despite various people’s interest, energy and support. He identifies that the key challenge, which is also at the heart of the model’s power, is the need for those with current power in the system to give it up. The author is of the opinion that after an initial period of painful discipline, the benefits will become clearer to all and the process will become more self-maintaining. It is clear that not all organizations make it over the hump. Similarly, while initially he took a whole-system ‘all or nothing’ approach to implementation, he has since softened his views and in this book he offers a chapter on holocracy-lite possibilities that offers guidance on how to implement parts of the process.

In summary

The book is well written, offering a clear and detailed explanation of the holocracy organizing process with a worked case study and anecdotes from experience used to illuminate how the various meetings and roles work.

My take on the model presented

This model is likely to appeal to those who have great faith in rationality and like highly structured, detailed and disciplined processes. In this sense it reads as very bureaucratic. It put me in mind of LEAN, another process that, in theory, makes perfect sense, however in practice often takes a lot of energy to maintain. Both demand great human discipline. Robertson is clear that the role of facilitator ‘requires that you override your instinct to be polite or ‘nice’ and that you cut people off if they speak out of turn’, amongst other skills and abilities. In this way it is trying to programme out the emotional irrational human decision-making influences such as ego, fear and group think, to create a less contaminated system of governance.

In many ways this model seems aligned to Appreciative Inquiry and co-creative ways of thinking. For example it is more wedded to biological than mechanical metaphors, it prioritises adaptability over predictability, and it is focused on releasing collective intelligence within a leader-ful organization. However, it seems to work against human nature, or human psychology, rather than with it. It is this constant fight against core features of human systems that, in my opinion, is at the heart of the gap between the promise of these kinds of models and the frequent experience of the lived reality.

However, I do think it offers a real, well thought out, and to some extend tried and tested alternative to our current creaking-under-the-strain-in-the-modern-era command and control organisational model. It will be interesting to see to what extent it is adapted across the organizational domain and I would love to hear from anyone who has either direct experience of working in an organization based on this model, or who has attended training on it.

Other Resources

Much more about organisational change can be found in Sarah’s new book Positive Psychology and Change

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology for Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management'.

See more Book Reviews and other Emergent Change, Leadership Skills and Organisational Development Strategy articles in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

The Distinctive Nature of Co-creative Change

How is it different, why is it better?

Co-creative approaches to organisational change such as Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, and World Café have some very distinctive features that differentiate them from more familiar top-down planned approaches to change.

1. Change is a many-to-many rather than one-to-many process

In co-creative change a lot can happen in a short space of time as conversation (and change) takes place simultaneously amongst people in various groups rather than relying on a linear transmission from top to bottom. It can feel messier and less controlled but the benefits of active engagement, participation and commitment far outweigh these concerns.

2. They work on the understanding that the world is socially constructed

By allowing that we live in social worlds that are constructed by interactions in relationship, these approaches recognise that beliefs, and so the potential for action, can be affected by processes or events. The co-creative change processes allow people to experience each other, and the world, differently and so adjust their mental maps of their social world, creating the potential for change.

3. Conversation is a dynamic process

Co-creative approaches to organisational change recognize that conversations and events take place in a dynamic context of mutual and reflexive influence. I act and speak in the context of what you are doing and saying and vice versa. This means that conversation is not a passive process for conveying information but is rather an active process for creation, and so holds the potential to create change.

4. Organisations are about patterns so changing organizations is about changing patterns

All of the above culminates in the understanding that organisational habits, culture, ways of being are held in place by the habitual patterns of conversation and interaction. Change these and you change the organization.

5. Change can occur at many levels simultaneously

Rather than being focused on rolling out a pre-designed planned change, these approaches are much more focused on growing change from the ground up. A useful metaphor to convey this is that of by encouraging of lots of different plants to flourish on the forest floor by changing the bigger context, such as clearing part of the canopy to allow in more light.

6. They connect to values to gain commitment

These approaches connect to people’s values as well as their analytic abilities. Appreciative Inquiry discovery interviews, for instance, quickly reveal people’s deep values about their organization and allow people with divergent surface views to form a meaningful connection at a deeper level that aids the negotiation of difference.

7. They create hope and other positive emotions

Appreciative Inquiry by design, and the other approaches by intention, focus on creating positive emotional states in the participants, particularly hope. Hope is a tremendously motivating emotion and is key source of energy for engaging with the disruption of change. By building hope in the group that the situation can be improved, these processes create great energy for the journey ahead.

8. They encourage high-quality connections and the formation of high-energy networks

These are two concepts from positive psychology and increasingly research is demonstrating that they have a positive effect on creativity, problem-solving and performance. The co-creation change methodologies are highly relational and facilitate the development of meaningful relationships particularly across silo or functional boundaries, increasing the ability of the whole organization to change in synchronisation with itself.

9. They allow people to feel heard

The very essence of the co-creative approaches is the emphasis on voice and dialogue as key components of change. As people are engaged with and have an opportunity to input to discussions about the need for change from the very beginning, and are also able to influence the design of change, they feel their voices and needs are being heard by the organization as the change unfolds. This greatly lessens the challenges of overcoming resistance or getting buy-in.

Appreciating Change specialises in helping organizations achieve positive, rapid and sustainable change.

Other Resources

Much more about the features of co-creative change, guidance on how to do it, and practical information about on the key methodologies mentioned here can be found in Sarah’ new book Positive Psychology and Change

See more Thought Provoking articles in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

The Economic Value Of Social Capital To Organizations

The Economic Value Of Social Capital To Organizations

What Is Social Capital?

Positive psychology understands social capital as a group or social phenomena that adds value by increasing trust and information flow around an organisation, however it can also be understood from an economic perspective.

From this perspective it can be defined as a combination of the number of relationships some one has, the economic usefulness to them of those relationships and the quality of them: effectively, how well known someone is, in what circles, and with what degree of affection. It is the social capital in an organisation that means that we care about the effect our work will have on the next part of the production chain, rather than slinging substandard work over the functional line saying, ‘done my bit, their problem now’.

Why Is It Important In Organisations?            

It is the social capital of an organisation that influences the return gained on the value of the financial and intellectual assets. It is what makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. It is social capital that releases organisational good citizen behaviour, high-level motivation and that ‘good feeling’ about work. Social capital is the antidote to the ubiquitous silo mentality that permeates most larger organizations: the tribal mentality that can act against the fullest realisation of the potential value of the organisational assets.

An organisation can purposefully invest in this valuable source of capital like any other. And as with any other investment, it is possible to identify the areas of investment likely to create the greatest return, and therefore carefully target investment activity. For instance it is probably not going to boost an organisations’ social capital if it invests in helping the canteen staff to get to know the board as much as it would to invest in building social capital within the board (which isn’t to say that the first option doesn’t have some value, and in some situations might have the greater value).

Why Don’t Organisations Invest More In Social Capital?

Often leaders can intuitively see the value of social capital, however an inability to quantify this capital, and the return on their investment, prevents them from taking the risk of investing in it. Interestingly intellectual capital, a similarly non-physical form of capital, does show financial returns that can be directly attributed to it on the balance sheet e.g. licensing revenue and royalties; these returns can be used by leaders to justify the initial investment they made in developing intellectual capital. At present no such mechanism exists for capturing and measuring the return on social capital investment.

Measuring the Economic Value of Social Capital

It is tempting to conclude from this that social capital can never exist in the financial sense in the way that machines, buildings and patents do; that it is not worth leaders making the additional effort to try and identify its effect on the balance sheet. Recent developments in economics suggests such thinking can be challenged. Social capital not only exists as a factor in economics, but exists to such a real and definable extent that it is now used by banks as collateral for loans, particularly micro-loans.

The Micro-Finance Story

Billions of dollars have been lent to (and repaid by) tens of millions of people in areas of the world where social capital is the only form of capital available, and not just in the third world: if you’re reading this in London, Manchester, Birmingham or Glasgow, to name but a few places, this is probably happening within a few miles of you.

Social capital is the basis of micro-finance, the practice of lending very small amounts of money to the very poor. It has already revolutionised development policy across the world. The problem, identified by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in the 1970s, was that the poor couldn’t borrow money from commercial sources not because they couldn’t pay it back but that they had no incentive to do so. This was because they had no collateral that could be repossessed if they defaulted. As a consequence no private lenders were prepared to lend them money.  Yunus’s experience with the Grameen Bank, and that of other micro-finance institutions, is that the poor, properly incentivised, have the highest repayment rates in the world when lent small amounts, almost 97%.

Yunus incentivised individuals by making possible future loans to others in the village conditional on the repayment of the loan by each borrower. In other words, he secured the loan against each villager’s social capital. If she defaulted, none of her friends or neighbours would get loans and she (the vast majority of micro-finance customers are women) would be persona non grata in the village. This suggests thatfor a particular individual her stock of social capital must be worth more to her than the value of the loan or she would not repay it. A Bangladeshi villager making the decision to repay a $20 loan is making a sophisticated calculation about the value of an intangible asset: her social capital. This clear behavioural indicator of choice suggests that a financial value can be put on an individual’s social capital.

Can Social Capital Be Measured In Organisations?

The micro-finance experience suggests that social capital can be measured.  The question is how can organisational leaders find a way of making such calculations for the stock of social capital in their organisations?

There is not a yet a clear answer on this. We can begin to recognise the social capital in organisations by reflecting it in our ways of talking about our organisation. For example referring the member of staff who takes time to contact colleagues to check out their needs and expectations, or who takes the time to let others know something has changed so they don’t waste their time, as invaluable, doesn’t help us recognise the value she adds. On the other hand saying she, and her actions, are valuable, starts to lead us to ask the right questions about ‘How valuable?’, and ‘How can we measure that?’ and ‘How much value does that behaviour add?’

How Can We Build Social Capital In Organisations?

We may not yet know how to measure social capital in organisations with any financial precision, but we do know how to invest in it and build it. Organisational development activities developed over the last few years, based on an understanding of the organisation as a living human system, act to increase social capital. Appreciating Change is an expert in these social capital investment activities.

Article by Sarah Lewis and Jem Smith

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more Thought Provoking articles in the Knowledge Warehouse.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Ten Top Tips For Weathering The Storm With Strengths Enhancing Appreciative Leadership

First Off - Don't Panic Or Feel Trapped

When disaster strikes, under the intense pressure to do something fast, it is very easy for leaders to make quick, isolated obvious decisions i.e. to have a round of redundancies. Very few people like to have to do this, but often feel they have no alternative. However alternatives are available, what they demand is a willingness to go beyond simple and obvious solutions and to call upon the wisdom and goodwill of the workforce. A leader who is willing to work appreciatively with his or her workforce in finding ways to survive and thrive in these challenging trading times will reap the benefit now and later.

Here are ten top tips for showing appreciative leadership to weather the storm

1. Stay creative. Don’t get drawn into ‘there is no alternative’ solutions or decisions. There are always alternatives; sometimes they are harder to see than the obvious solutions.

2. Work with choice over compulsion. If you need to cut the wages bill consider ways other than compulsory redundancies. Clearly voluntary redundancy and early retirement are good first places to go. Ask if anyone is interested in unpaid leave or working part-time for a while. Then spread the pain and include yourself. For instance you could reduce everyone’s working week and pay by 20%, including your own. Fix a date for review. Yes this is likely to introduce a scheduling challenge. What are your managers for? Make it clear that people have choices to work with you or to choose to leave if they think they can do better elsewhere.

3. Don’t cancel Christmas! Just do it differently. For many people it’s a huge job perk. And it’s effectively a reward for their work and loyalty over the year. Cancelling the Christmas party will be experienced as a punishment (the withdrawal of something nice in the environment) by many people. Instead get creative. How can you still provide a party for your staff on a less extravagant scale? Involve them in this question. Make it clear you still want to create the opportunity for an organizational celebratory gathering but the budget has, understandably, contracted, what ideas do they have for creating a cheap, fun event? Call on your people’s strengths, who is the natural party animal, who will be motivated to find a way to make it happen? Delegate and empower, you have other things to worry about.

4. Create and spread messages of hope not doom and gloom. Such messages might be around the themes that you have faith in your people, that this too will pass, that this slack time creates opportunities for investing in refining and improving processes, that the organization can emerge stronger and so on.

5. Use the intelligence, creativity, and resourcefulness of the whole organization. Don’t feel, because you are the well-paid leader, that you have to do it all yourself. People will be as keen as you that the organization survive. They won’t be as aware of you of the immediate dangers because they don’t have access to, nor do they focus on, the forecast figures. So, you will need to create and provide structures and processes to allow people collectively to understand, contribute and influence. Sending out a memo asking for ideas is unlikely to be sufficient. There are many existing methodologies that can help with this: Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology, Workout and other large group techniques.

6. Welcome volunteerism. You may only be able to pay for 4 working days but in the interests of the organization’s survival some people may be willing to work more. Welcome, appreciate and put to good use such offers, don’t assume or take for granted such support. Don’t penalize those who, for whatever reason, can’t do more. Ask and appreciate, don’t demand and expect.

7. Welcome flexibility. Put your people on the most important task. This may not be their usual task. ‘All hands to the pumps’ is a call people recognize and understand. Play to their strengths. If the most important task is talking to customers and potential customers then maybe some of your people could team up with a sales person to do their admin so they can spend more time actually talking to customers. Who has ‘informal’ relationships with your customers and could be called into play? Identify natural strengths, train in anything else needed.

8. Talk to your people. Share your knowledge in a carefully framed way. This is a time for inspirational leadership. It is also a time for humbleness and honesty. You need to combine an awareness of the scale of the challenge and of the hopefulness of success. You can’t make all the changes necessary to adapt quickly to new circumstances on your own or by diktat. To coin a phrase, it really helps if people want to change. Work to motivate them through hope and a belief in the future, not fear and despair about the present.

9. Be visible. Spread faith and confidence by your presence. Talk to people; be available for people to talk to. Resist the temptation to lock yourself away solving the problem. Ensure that your management team is out getting the best from their people, not locked away obsessing over spreadsheets.

10. Above all don’t panic, don’t allow others to panic, and don’t be panicked by the anxiety of others. People in a panic are rarely able to think creatively or flexibly, or to create confidence in others. Stay calm, create choice, involve others, offer affirming and appreciative leadership and find some support for yourself to enable you to do this.

To behave like this when all around you are going for the quick win of shedding longstanding and loyal staff is not easy. This is the time to recognise your organization as a collection of people of whom you have the privilege to lead. Recognise them as honoured followers, call out the best in them. Make it everyone’s challenge and not just yours to find ways to survive and thrive that are as good for the people, the organization, the present and the future as they can be.

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques to boost engagement at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more 'How To' in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715

Ten Tips for Effective Strategic Development

This blog article has two accompanying case studies: Making Strategy Real and Open Space For Strategic Development

What is Strategy?

Organisations often think of strategy as a plan for achieving a specific future. This plan is created by a small group of people who then inform others of the vision of the future and how it will be achieved.

A Compass, Not An Alien Artefact

This process can result in the production of a strategic document that appears opaque if not irrelevant to the rest of the organization. I have sat with many a group attempting to ‘decode’ the strategic document just handed down from on high into something that is meaningful, useful or compelling in their local context. Generally the connection, the relevance, is more created than uncovered.

Strategy is the lodestar of organization: it creates direction and holds things together. Without a sense of the over-arching purpose, direction and values of the organisation it is difficult for people to prioritise amongst the many competing demands on their time and energy. A good strategy acts like an internal compass for all employees, enabling them to prioritise their activities against a common understanding of ‘the most important things’, even when working in isolation.

It is possible to create strategy in a way that understands it not as a plan handed down by omniscience others, but as a co-created organizational story of future direction and intent. Here are some tips for working with strategy in this way.

How To Build Your Compass

1. Invert the usual process

The usual pattern for strategic development is that a small group of people design ‘the strategy’ which they then attempt to get the rest of the organization, the large group, to adopt. It is quite possible, as our case study ‘Making Strategy Real’ shows, to invert this process by involving a large group of stakeholders in initial strategic conversations, which a small group then write up as the strategic document. This approach allows data analysis, theme identification, creation of new initiatives, commitment to outcomes, common vision, motivation and energy for change to be created simultaneously rather than in staged sequences. Given this, change is likely to happen much more quickly.

2. Create positive energy for change

Large group co-creative approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry or SOAR create energy for the change right from the start. However, if the organization is doing strategy more traditionally all is not lost. We know that inducing positive mood states and helping people identify their strengths helps people engage with change, even if it is imposed rather than self-generated. So create opportunities for groups to identify what they are doing that points in the new direction, the successes they are achieving, the changes they are making, and the resilience they are demonstrating as well as the endless opportunities for identifying shortfalls, delays etc. Spend time helping people identify their strengths and working out how to apply them every day.

3. Recognise that strategy is what people do

Strategic becomes a ‘lived’ process as people make different decisions, moment-by-moment, to those they made in the past. While big ‘strategic’ events are important for various reasons, it’s micro-moment differences and decisions that add up to change. Every conversation, every decision, every action is either pointing towards the desired future direction or away from it. However habitual behaviour, aligned to past strategy, is strong. Therefore attention has to be paid at the granular level to the language used and the way things are talked about, as well as to what is being done, to create new patterns.

4. Use ‘word and deed’ to create new organizational fields

Drawing on quantum physics, Wheatley identified that effective leaders implement new strategy by their words and deeds. They choose words and deeds that fill the conversational, meaning or  social space with clear and consistent ideas about the new strategy, for example how the customers are to be served. This kind of behaviour creates a new system ‘field’, one strong in congruence, influencing behaviour in only one direction. In effect they create a field of influence that make certain behaviours more likely.

5. Help people understand what ‘strategically aligned behaviour’ looks like

People often have difficulty translating the words on the page of a strategic document into ‘what it means for us’. One way to help people create a stronger vision and sense of what the new strategy looks like is to seek out early examples of behaviour that is ‘pointing in the right direction’ and to pro-actively amplify and broadcast these stories. These are stories that exemplify ‘yes, this is what we want, this is what we mean’. It’s hard for people to imagine things they have never experienced. Sharing stories that act as models of what is required helps people to ‘get it’.

6. Recognise strategy as an emergent process

Strategy becomes a lived reality in an organization through an emergent process. People have to feel their way into ‘doing’ the new strategy. Sometimes organizations act as if strategy can be dictated and people can start working in this new and different way with never a false step being made. This expectation hampers progress as people are afraid they will make a mistake, whilst also quickly creating the sense of things going wrong. Recognising the enactment of strategy as a discovery process, with false starts, blind alleys and a general iterative ‘two steps forward, one step back’ process, helps greatly in creating and sustaining momentum for change.

7. Retell the story of strategy around the organization

The strategic ‘story’ needs to be shared in many different ways in many different contexts with many different groups. We work out what we mean by what we say through this process of telling and retelling. The creation of strategy is not a uni-directional communication process, it is a collaborative co-creating dialogue process. Organisational understanding of what the words on the paper mean in practice emerges through shared dialogue.

8. Create a strategy that is both familiar and different

We can conceptualise strategy as a fiction. It is a fictional account of a possible future. Ideally it is a co-authored story (see point 1) but often it is a story created by some people that they need others to believe. To grasp and hold our interest stories need to be both credible and unfamiliar. Appreciative inquiry is perfect for this. The articulation of the best of past in which we recognize ourselves offers the ‘credible’ part of the story, while the following three stages, dream, design and destiny, offer the generative part of the story. During these phases, the organization creates a picture of itself that is built on the familiar yet is importantly different, new.

9. Make the strategy tangible

The way this is usually done is to produce a report. The printed word is more tangible, carries more weight, than just words. When we hold the document in our hands we can see that we have done something, much more so than when we emerge from a dialogue event with ‘just’ different ideas in our heads. The challenge is to go beyond just a document. How else can the organization make the new strategy tangible? Pictures, logos, diagrams are all part of this process. Encouraging people and groups to physically model (with Lego or plasticine for example) the past and the future, and then talking about the difference, can help with this.

10. Strategy is a verbal activity

Finally, as a summary of most of the above, it is important to recognise that strategy is a verbal activity. How we talk is different to how we write. The written strategy document is unlikely to be a direct source for effective verbal explanations. Different groups and different people need different approaches if they are to ‘get it’. Ideally the talking comes before the writing, so people can see their words in the document. But it is quite possible to reverse the process, helping groups create a verbal account of the handed down written word. Which I believe brings me back to where I started.

More on these and related topics can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more articles from the Knowledge Warehouse on this topic here.

Appreciating Change Can Help

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organizations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership and Culture change.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715